Artie's second line is the best part of the strip for me. It might seem redundant for Artie to get turned human twice, but in my mind the initial test run in Dave's body, back in "Doppelganger Gambit," prepped him for his more complex assignment here.

I like Helen's Super Soaker-like guns. And hey, the three-eyed smiley mug makes a late cameo!

I like the big transmogrifier arrangement. That's pretty boss, frankly.

Helen worries periodically about Artie's ability to wreak the preferred amount of havoc. It's one of the few downsides of working with gerbils.

It always bugs me when evolution is portrayed as some kind of logical progression with a goal, although it does occasionally lead to hilariously awesome things like that episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where the crew "de-evolves" and Barclay turns into a spider and Data's cat turns into an iguana. But not the episode of "Voyager" where Paris turns into a giant salamander and has salamander babies with Janeway, because that was really wrong. Why did that happen?

(That said, I'm watching "Voyager" on Netflix now, and I was always pretty down on that show but it has some great moments. Mostly the body-swap episode where the Doctor is downloaded into Seven of Nine's body. And the subplot is Tuvok going into pon farr! That episode could not be more solid!)

(Ahem.)

The poster on the wall of Dave's office is for Ladyhawke, a classic movie about people turning into animals and stuff. Ladyhawke comes up repeatedly in my comics, mostly because it has such a great title. Ladyhawke and Killdozer!, best titles of anything ever.

Nicodemus after one of the rats in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Lafcadio after the Shel Silverstein book Lafcadio, The Lion Who Shot Back, and Cricetida after Cricetidae, the family gerbils used to belong to before they got reclassified as Muridae.

I always had mixed feelings about Artie's name; it seems a little informal for him. But maybe it's better that way. Artie shares my feelings, apparently.

The illegible name on the spine of the book is "Beagle," for Peter S. Beagle, whose The Last Unicorn deals with a nonhuman character getting turned human and being generally pissy about it. I assume "Wells" is H.G. Wells, for The Island of Doctor Moreau, but it could just as easily be Jeffrey Wells, for being awesome.

Helen is right. Italian baby names were and are very trendy.

On the art front, the book Artie is reading doesn't look like it's opened wide enough, which always bothered me. I wasn't so good at drawing open books.

I wrote this strip pretty early in the run of Narbonic. Artie's choice is an extremely oblique reference to the Tom Robbins novel Still Life with Woodpecker, in which the heroine is at one point strongly attracted to Ralph Nader. Man, is this week packed with random obscure references, or what?

Do you have any idea how hard it is to indicate that Dave is looking downward when he has no visible eyes? For that alone, this strip should be declared a national treasure. But it was all worth it to do a dick joke.

OK, it's definitely Big, and nicely Freakin' (in a Zeerust kind of way), but it's not the type of Gun used for making health-impairing holes in other people. No change to the BF(tm)G count.

(TUNE: "We Didn't Start The Fire", Billy Joel)

Helen's there, young and fair, working in her evil lair,She squeals, "Changed alleles! Whaddaya know?"Look at what she made one day, weird trans-mo-gri-fy-ing ray!Turn an ordinary joe, into Marilyn Monroe!Henchmen, toy with them,Dave turned into Lupin M.,Helen grinned, and very soon,Dave was sent up to the Moon!Now we see that Helen's gotBrand new evil science plot!Although Artie's very sage,He'd go on a poor rampage!

Helen's transmogrifier Isn't what we're seekin', though it's Big and Freakin' ... Helen's transmogrifier, Though it's cool and thrillin', isn't make for killin'!

Even kicking over a cup of coffee is hard if (a) it's bigger and heavier than you are and (b) you're not the type who would condone littering for any reason anyway. And unionizing a bunch of androids is hardly a "rampage."

Yes, with a few exceptions, Artie's done far more damage to the world accidentally than anyone else in the comic does on purpose. Exceptions being the alternate-future counterparts of Mell (destroying the universe) and Dave. Really, everyone else is making Helen Beta look bad, in terms of a rampage of terror. Her mother must be so disappointed.

@Kay: I agree that Artie has caused truly awe-inspiring amounts of damage, but there's more to a "rampage" than just causing damage. The definition lies not just in the damage but also in the motivations of the one committing the rampage (which is why, say, earthquakes aren't really said to go on rampages). "Rampage" implies a non-rational, largely uncontrolled outburst of anger or rage--one of the reasons a certain fuzzy white ball of repression found it so hard to rampage over in Skin Horse. From Artie's perspective, unionizing the androids was hardly a non-rational (a little naive, maybe) or angry act but an altruistic attempt to help intelligent beings claim their rightful autonomy.

Oh, my, it's been years since I last watched Ladyhawke. Clearly, this must be remedied; thank you, Shaenon, for putting it back on my radar. A great medieval fantasy with a synthesizer soundtrack that could only have been made in the '80s. And Leo McKern!

Shaenon: There are a few more eps that are worth watching. Unfortunately, there are some which are not. The Paris->salamander ep is unmistakably one of the latter. The fundamental problem is that Failure Is The Only Option (no, I am not linking to TV Tropes for this), or else the series is instantly over. The writers just weren't good enough to make that work consistently.

I remain fond of several two-parters: "Year of hell," where Kurtwood Smith kept changing the timeline to get his dead wife back, "The Killing Game" where they fought Hirogen Nazis and "Workforce," where their memories were wiped and they ended up factory workers. Plus, "Tuvix," where Neelix and Tuvok get merged, an interesting ethical dilemma.

I had assumed Lafcadio was for the character from the classic French "Les Caves du Vatican". Or else Lafcadio Hearn.

Kay Gilbert (kaygilbert) says:
Top this, Speedy: I went to the bathroom with Ralph Nader! While in grad school at the University of Kansas, I directed a TV show on which Nader was a guest. We had one restroom in the old studio, and when I walked out of a stall, Nader was there. He started, and asked if this was the Ladies' Room. I explained that it was the Person's Room. We had an interesting conversation about the long-gone sidewalk urinals of Paris, which he had used in his student days. Like Leigh-Cheri (though Robbins hadn't yet published Still Life), I had more than a little crush on Nader back then. Ah, the Seventies!

In Still Life with Woodpecker, the heroine ends up having a passionate love affair with a character obviously based on the Unabomber. The book was written before the identity of the Unabomber was known; in retrospect, Ralph Nader clearly wins on raw sex appeal.

General question: I'm happy to have my comment held for approval, if it means keeping out the spambots. But when it does get posted, all the formatting and paragraphs are gone. Others don't seem to be having this problem. Should I be doing something differently?

Silent Penultimate Panels... 38. By the way, is Helen raising one finger in the last panel, or two? If the latter, I fear that this comic is approaching dangerous kawaii levels.

Azrael Rose (mr_a_rose) says:
@Kay Gilbert
Your prev. comment appears to be full of the sort of junk MS Word likes to add to documents so it can pretend its using a valid XML spec for its layout. Despite the use of angle brackets, this has very little to do with HTML and most browsers/HTML parsers will throw a wobbly when they encounter it.
Either use a raw text editor like notepad and add the right tags manually, or use a dedicated HTML editor like Komposer or something.